Posting Frequency

26Feb2018

You’ve just started a blog and you’d really like to see it move around online on its feet. You want to know when to update your blog, how the maintain the audience’s engagement and how to gain more followers.

You feel that the blog is your newborn baby, so you need to hold its hand and show it its way in this rough, fast-changing, rapid-moving world we call the Internet.

As in growing up children, where there is no special recipe that can guarantee your child will be well educated and well-raised, so it happens with blogs.

There is NO rule about what to write and when to do it! However, you could make use of a few tips and good guiding lines, like with children rearing, but only you can decide when to update your blog.

You’ll feel your way through, in the end, don’t worry!

First things first: make a good blog

In order for you to have something to update and keep up, you need to create it. You can’t do this anyway, but by taking a few things into consideration.

Upgrade Your WordPress

Become Super Competitive Now!

Overtake your competitors with today's free Upgrade!

https://

.com

1. Select your field of interest.

Before starting to design your blog, carefully select its theme/ subject/ area of interest. This is very important, as from this will spur all the other things.

This will influence the type and number of your audience, even the number of times you post, the style you use in writing and so on.

2. Select your audience.

After settling down for a theme/idea/subject, pick up the perfect audience for it. You should try to describe these people in terms of age, interests and hobbies, gender, workplace, social class, etc. In other words, you must find out your niche, or buyer personas.

3. Select your blogging platform

You should also think of the blogging platform you’ll be writing on, such as WordPress, and after the writing process begins, you can actually start to think when you should update your blog.

4. Optimize your posts.

Before updating your blog, optimize your posts for 100% SEO.

You can do this by using the Squirrly WordPress SEO plugin, which gives you SEO advice while you are typing your articles, finds the keywords that are trending in your domain, tracks all the aspects of your content marketing strategy, gives you professional advice on how to fix problems and improve marketing, and monitors your progress and improvement week by week.

Posting frequency

1. Start posting at least 3 times a week to be competitive. This is a good starting point and it helps you with feed readers, thus you gain SEO value. This again depends on the focus of your blog.

Posting more times per week means increased chances of getting into Google News and makes search engine crawlers index your articles faster. This way it’s more likely that your articles will be found on the web. I’ll give you a few examples:

If it’s a “hottest”-news blog, then posting twice per day is more suitable

If it’s a product-based blog and you have to advertise new products, special offers and trends, you could try posting once per day

If it’s a service-based blog, and there aren’t many changes happening at the service provided, you can stick to the 3 times a week posting.

You don’t need to post 5 times a week and to suffocate your readers with fresh content. What your audience wants is an equilibrium of quality and quantity.

There is definitely something bad about posting too much when unnecessary. Sometimes posting 3 times per week is not the desired strategy. Why?

1. Now, if you start posting 3 times per week you might be inclined to do, say, 200-word articles or articles which have low-quality, and your audience will start seeing that you are not serious and they might think: “hey, these guys used to post really great content. Now look at them: due to their desire to be SEO and post a lot, they’ve just started to post 200-word articles”, which are really short.

What are they trying to do?! Do they want to become Upworthy.com, so that they get SEO gains and then they can get your email and a like on their FB, and so on.

So, this is the dark side of posting too much. You can become more and more aggressive and what’s going to happen is that people are going to run away from you. Don’t do it!

2. The other problem with posting a lot is that you can end up providing less value. The value of your content might drop, so your audience will figure it out and be disappointed. While there seemed to be a perfect fit between you and your audience, you will start growing apart.

This can ruin your company blog, your business and over time you’ll see that you won’t be getting as many leads as up till then.

3. It can also start getting a bit costly. If you post more than 3 times a week you’ll see that you need to invest more time (and money) into researching for articles, writing them, and your time will have to get involved in writing them.

The best solution is, if you’re not a writer yourself, to address the right people. Squirrly offers you high quality content writing services. You can take a look at our offer and how our clients perceive us 🙂

2. Be consistent! Posting frequently is very important for search engines and also for the people who are following your blog. You actually have human readers who care about the stuff they get from you.

If you want to make your audience stay loyal to you and return on your blog, you need to post consistently.

If you post 2-3 times a week you maintain a good position in Google Ranks, you keep your audience hooked, and by scheduling a clear time for your posting, let’s say 3 P.M, they’ll know when to look at your site for new content.

If you post frequently enough you also increase your social traffic, because on social media people care about updates. Twitter, Google+, Facebook, they are all about updates.

Let’s pretend that you post just 1 article per month. What happens then?! Well, on your social media accounts you’ll have only one single post. This is not going to help you, because people are expecting to see updates from you.

By not posting almost anything on your blog, people will start thinking that you don’t have anything new to offer them.

3. Make an Editorial Calendar. This will help you face the challenge of consistency.

You should plan at least one month ahead, so that you make sure that you have fresh content on the day you need to post it, but don’t stretch too much into the future.

This again depends on your area of concern, if it’s about classic facts known in science or truths know to everyone, you could stretch this editorial calendar even to a year, but if it’s about breaking news, I’d say don’t go over a week, and be prepared to update daily.

So, be flexible depending on your content, but 1 month ahead of time is a good starting point.

4. Be active on social media

Facebook. You should try to post twice a day, when you think your audience is more active, because Facebook content expires in 3 hours from the moment you’ve posted it and you want to make sure everybody reaches your content. You should try to post minimum 3 times a week, and maximum 10 times. Impress through quality!

Twitter. Everything travels fast on Twitter, so you could try and post about 5 times per day, anything that seems valuable to your audience and in the focus of your blog.

LinkedIn. You can go from 2 times a week to 5 times, but don’t dominate the feed, and aim to spread interesting, though formal facts about your business and area of interest.

Google+. If you post frequently on Google+, the search engine receives more content, keywords and expertise to link to your blog. You should try and post between 3 to 10 times a week.

An engaged audience is a satisfied audience. An audience that is kept up to date, is a trusting audience. If you update your blog regularly you’ll ensure your audience’s confidence, trust and loyalty. In the end, that’s all you want for your blog. To be loved and appreciated. Isn’t it?

If you found posting frequency a difficult task, you can contact the team from Squirrly and we can help you by offering content for your site. Go to our Content Writing Services and we can work out a strategy.

We generally do this by thinking about your audience and what your audience needs and we can definetely help you out with creating more and valuable content for your site if you get stuck or if it seems that your time doesn’t allow you to post more than 1 time per week.